Monthly Archives: June 2011

Here’s how we cele­brated the longest day of the year: with the NY première of Mauricio Kagel’s Eine Brise, for 111 cyclists.

OK, there aren’t exactly 111 of us, but I think the piece sounds pretty great anyway. The above video (courtesy of master video­g­ra­pher Adrian Knight) actually shows two perfor­mances: one going each way up and down Cornelia St., which was closed off for the occasion.

I got to be the leader. One of the proudest perfor­mances of my life.

And on a related note, here’s a nice little article on NYC cyclists from the Wall Street Journal, of all places.

Yester­day was the Bang on a Can marathon, which is a type of marathon for non-athletic people. I got to play At the River, at a river, for the second time this month. The marathon is the kind of thing that feels, to me, as though it had always existed, and will always continue to exist—I am happy to have been a small part of this contin­uum.

But that’s not the only marathon happen­ing around now—there’s one in Atlanta, Georgia called Sonic­Palooza on June 25th, with 10 hours of your favorite (mostly mini­mally-inclined) music, includ­ing my own Crashing Through Fences. 2 PM until midnight at the Woodruff Arts Center. All my Georgian cohort, be there.

I’ve been making siphon coffee for about a year (I use a stovetop pot) but I’ve never been as clinical about it as the guy in this video. I am so excited to now have a morning-time use for my meat ther­mome­ter.

Here’s an idea I had while I was learning some new pieces for my Barge­mu­sic show last week. Perhaps perform­ers, not composers, were at the root of all the complex­ity in new music, espe­cially 20th-century music. A kind of “perfor­mance anxiety”, but not in the usual sense of the term.

When a performer learns a newly-composed piece of music, he asks himself at a certain point: is this piece any good? Is it worth the time and effort I’m putting into it? If the question persists, it makes it pretty tough to do your job.

But if the music is so dense and complex that even the performer can’t under­stand it, that pretty much solves the problem. Is the piece good or bad? Who cares, because it’s completely unas­sail­able! The performer’s job is reduced from cultural gate­keeper to manual laborer. Invest­ing so much in learning a piece of complex music is kind of like buying an expen­sive, unre­li­able European sports car: you have to justify it to yourself somehow, or you’ll go crazy.

The end result is decreased risk for the performer of contem­po­rary music. That impen­e­tra­ble wall of perceived quality is trans­ferred to them. Maybe perform­ers actually put them­selves at greater risk by choosing to play music that’s more outwardly grasp-able or emotion­ally acces­si­ble. And what good are you if you don’t take risks?

Here is a lovely video that shows why biking in midtown Manhat­tan is so much fun:

The reason I like this video so much is that it shows that no one group of people is at fault for traffic problems. Very often you’ll read coverage from, say, the perspec­tive of cyclists laying all blame on cars; the car people decry lawless cyclists. No one ever seems to blame pedes­tri­ans. Just watch this video, though, and you’ll see terrible behavior from all involved parties.